Day 276, December 17, 2020
Pull
Tonight's Soundtrack: The Talking Heads, Rome, 1980
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| He refused to go any further. |
We had our first big storm of the season and it was windy enough that big drifts engulfed the front of the car. I tried to take Franklin out for a walk, and once he found himself just barely able to keep his head over the surface of the snow he turned back and dragged me back to the front door. By mid-afternoon the snow had stopped, but there was still a bitter biting wind. I donned my balaclava, my big coat, the heavy winter boots, and ski gloves and headed out to snow blow.
The snowblower is an old battle scarred relic that has survived two house moves and was purchased used after the hand-me-down snow blower from my childhood died. The transmission is a bit wonky and sometimes gets stuck so you have to shift back and forth from forward to reverse until it slips back into gear. The protective plate covering the gearbox has fallen away, so one does need to be conscious about one's toes. But on the other hand, it only took a pull or two before it roared to life, and despite its age and veteran status, it still powered through snow deep enough to bury the exit chute.
At the end of each winter we think it is time to buy a new snowblower, but then I eek one more year out of the machine. It is like an old trusty friend, even as I grow wary of the fraying starter rope and lack of safety features. I don't quite have the intimate relationship with machines as might a person who knows how to rebuild carburetors and things like that. But I can follow a fuel line and replace a filter, and simple things like that. The truth is that I keep my yard equipment running primarily by empathy. It has been a long spring, summer, and fall, and yes, I'm sure the mice and chipmunks defiled the auger and chute with their antics. I understand that it is a hard thing to be asked to do anything when the temperature has dropped below freezing and there is a biting wind. I know the starter line is liable to snap the way the handle is drooping off the engine. And... I know the more firm and assured I pull the starter line, the more likely the engine will sputter to life, coughing and spitting until I adjust the choke.
I learned that last trick by watching Lou, who once came to give this same snowblower a tune up. He asked what the issue was and I mentioned that I was having trouble getting it started. He walked up to the machine like it was a thing that was respected, but needed to know its station in life. Just watching the way he pulled the starter cord made me realize I had been doing it wrong all these years.
I think my first starter cord was the short length of nylon rope with a knot on one end and a wood handle tied on the other. This was coiled around the top of a half horsepower Johnson outboard motor that was affixed to a flat backed aluminum canoe. One slipped the knot into the notch on the top of the reel and coiled the rope around once or twice and pulled. Then repeat the process for several times until the little motor finally sputtered to life mumbling into the shallows. I can't remember how old I was once I started taking the canoe out on my own, but it seems like I was young, maybe 10 years old? It seems absurd now, but we did things younger back then. That little motor propelled me all over Goose Pond (which is really two mountain lakes linked together by a narrow channel (the goose neck). There were special places on the lake where, with my childhood friend Bobby, or sometimes on my own, I would seek out the deep pockets where the anchor would dangle straight down until there was almost no slack left in the line. Or in the reeds in Upper Goose where one could leave a minnow and crayfish trap for a few hours. When the day got warm you could go swimming around a sunken forest, or snorkel and retrieve lures and propellers snapped off their shafts from the shallow outcropping that rose up in the middle of the lake.
It seems like an unfair trick of the mind to send me off into childhood summers on the evening of our first winter storm. But I did have a relationship with that little motor and used to imagine that I could hear it speak in how it moved through the water as I adjusted the throttle and opened it up across open water. It couldn't have been very fast, but particularly on a glass smooth morning right at dawn, it felt as if one was gliding across the sky.
Snow blowing is not quite like that. At moments today, it was bitter and biting in a way that was made me grimace in pain and squeeze my eyes shut. But there is also something about the end of the run, which for me includes cutting paths through the yard to the wood pile, the compost pile, the chickens, and the propane tanks. Afterwards one can't help but stand in appreciation of the clean cut of the snowblower through the deep banks. It is a satisfying sensation and it rehumanizes the landscape a little bit, as if it could be domesticated. It is funny, I suppose, that I trade the lawnmower for the snowblower and trade off keeping back the knotweed and sumac for maintaining pathways for automobiles, the mail carrier, and the propane delivery truck.
Even though my toes haven't really warmed back up since my jaunt outside, it was still refreshing and nice to move my body, to ease the stubborn machine around turns, and when it refused to cooperate, just drag it into place with sheer force, to spend an hour outside breathing in the cold air, and feeling alive.
Take care and be well,
Leo
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